Current state of pool hopping?

[NLA]

So I did some searching this afternoon on Google and around the forums, and almost all chatter about pool hopping seems to have died sometime around December and January. Few hopping-related threads have popped up within the past 4-5 months. I see there is still some activity in certain pool hopping clients (bitHopper) which seem to have continued development, and no activity in other once-popular hoppers (CherryPicking).

This makes me wonder, is pool hopping dead? Is there no extra profit to be made from hopping anymore? Are all pools immune to hopping nowadays? Whats going on? What happened to all the interest in hopping?

[rjk]

So I did some searching this afternoon on Google and around the forums, and almost all chatter about pool hopping seems to have died sometime around December and January. Few hopping-related threads have popped up within the past 4-5 months. I see there is still some activity in certain pool hopping clients (bitHopper) which seem to have continued development, and no activity in other once-popular hoppers (CherryPicking).

This makes me wonder, is pool hopping dead? Is there no extra profit to be made from hopping anymore? Are all pools immune to hopping nowadays? Whats going on? What happened to all the interest in hopping?

It got to be such a huge business that most of the proportional pools finally gave up the ghost or switched to a different method. The major exceptions are Slush, who can still be hopped regardless of his special time weight if you have enough hash to throw at him, and Deepbit, who still offers prop at 3% and PPS at 10%. And Slush is planning to move to DGM like ozco, EMC, etc. but hasn't finished the move yet.

There still may be some small prop pools around, but most of them are either too small to be worth it, or they ban hoppers.

[Garr255]

Yup. Hopping was an art back in the day, but technology has pretty much obliterated it.

[Nyaaan]

Unfortunately it is no longer worth it.

[NLA]

It got to be such a huge business that most of the proportional pools finally gave up the ghost or switched to a different method. The major exceptions are Slush, who can still be hopped regardless of his special time weight if you have enough hash to throw at him, and Deepbit, who still offers prop at 3% and PPS at 10%. And Slush is planning to move to DGM like ozco, EMC, etc. but hasn't finished the move yet.

There still may be some small prop pools around, but most of them are either too small to be worth it, or they ban hoppers.

By "have enough hash to throw at him", would ~5.75GH/s be sufficient? I'm putting together a 7x 7970 rig atm.

So, if I wanted to at least look into continued hopping with the client I paid for ages ago (CherryPicking), I should check on Slush and Deepbit.. any others I should look into?

[rjk]

It got to be such a huge business that most of the proportional pools finally gave up the ghost or switched to a different method. The major exceptions are Slush, who can still be hopped regardless of his special time weight if you have enough hash to throw at him, and Deepbit, who still offers prop at 3% and PPS at 10%. And Slush is planning to move to DGM like ozco, EMC, etc. but hasn't finished the move yet.

There still may be some small prop pools around, but most of them are either too small to be worth it, or they ban hoppers.

By "have enough hash to throw at him", would ~5.75GH/s be sufficient? I'm putting together a 7x 7970 rig atm.

So, if I wanted to at least look into continued hopping with the client I paid for ages ago (CherryPicking), I should check on Slush and Deepbit.. any others I should look into?

Well, I don't know the mathematical stuff about it, but if you check out his hash rate you will find that it is surging by upwards of 400 gigahashes per second after each block. I don't know if all of that is necessary to make it happen, but it isn't quite as simple as the 40% stuff that you can use on a standard prop pool.

However, organofcorti or Meni Rosenfeld could probably elaborate on what's needed to effectively hop on Slush's pool.

[-ck]

Slush has been promising to do so for a while, but not delivered yet. Deepbit and Slush, ironically two of the largest, remain the most hoppable. Presumably because they've remained large and profitable, they haven't felt any urge whatsoever to change their system. Their hashrates have been in absolute terms about the same for a long time (long in the bitcoin mining world anyway), suggesting nothing but apathy, inertia and "good enough" mentality from their miners. Hopefully that will change. Encouraging people to hop those pools may have unexpected effects on the timeframe for moving away from hoppable pay schemes because the pool itself doesn't actually lose by having hoppers, only their long term miners lose. So while in theory it could help force them to change their pay scheme sooner, in practice since most long-term miners there are the ones losing, and they're the ones apathetic about change, they won't notice unless they somehow become aware of just how much profit they're losing out on.

[organofcorti]

I'm surprised Slush is still using the old exponential score. He mentioned that he'd be changing to DGM nearly a month ago, and back then it was going to happen "in the next few days".You can get about 1.2 x expected on a round there, which of course comes out of the fulltime miners pockets.


To hop Slush's pool, you need to know:

1. current difficulty (easy)
2. current pool hashrate (harder, use average since start of round which is available from pool website)
3. the current 'c' constant being used.

Then the point at which you should leave the round (in terms of total submitted shares/difficulty) is approximately:

Code:

Hop point =0.0164293+1.14254/(1.8747*D/(hashrate*c)+2.71828)

More details here, including a link to code that will calculate 'c' for you:
http://howtohop.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/how-to-hop-8-determining-slush-and.html

You  can hop btcmine the same way.

Afaik, bitcoinpool is still prop, you could try them. I can't check because they've IP banned me and I can't be bothered to fire up a proxy and check.

Using long polling with Deepbit, you used to be able to get about 1.45 x expected. If you can use kinlo's http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/blocklist.php you might be able to narrow down block ownership and hop deepbit a bit better.

Everyone else has gone fair, even bitclockers. New pools that try prop payouts get stuck at 0.43 x D and then die, and the older pools changed to fair payouts after miners either noticed underpayment on short rounds, or lost miners to fair pay pools, or wanted to do right by their miners and actually paid attention to almost a year's worth of posting on the subject by Meni.

I also noticed that Slush's miners want him to start DGM asap, and message on the thread about it frequently. They have also noticed shorter rounds paying less, so hopefully that will give Slush a bit of a push to get DGM implemented.

Deepbit's miners don't care since a) I think lots of them are new, b) from what I've been able to determine recently, Deepbit is not being hopped nearly as much as they were a few months ago, and I'd say fulltime miners there are losing a lot less than they used to, and c) as Con mentioned, inertia.

Pool hopping will always be profitable while there are proportional payout pools. The profit might be minimal and not worth your time if you're not into fiddly management of a proxy, but it will be there.

By "have enough hash to throw at him", would ~5.75GH/s be sufficient? I'm putting together a 7x 7970 rig atm.

In order to maximise share payout at Slush, the pool's hashrate needs to have a significant increase, for example 30% (seems to be about that last I looked). But you don't have to be responsible for that alone, and the proportion provided by you will make no diffierence to your share payout. But even if you were the only one hopping Slush's pool, and only with say 350 Mhps, your submitted shares would still have an expected value greater than one as long as you leave the pool as described above.

if not you just mine the first 16.5% of each round to get max...

Sort of, Goat. 16.5% was a reasonable rule of thumb a month or two ago, but at Slush's hashrate is slowly decreasing and difficulty increasing, if c doesn't change then the hop point will start to drop. Assuming 'c' hasn't changed (can't be bothered to calculate to check I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader),  the hop point atm is about 10 - 11%.

So, anyone (in Australia) want a used 6970 or 6990? I haven't used them since November last year - pool hopping just isn't what it once was. Not really fun anymore.


Edit: I was reminded that Bitlc is still hoppable. They might be delaying stats, do you'd need to use longpoll information the way it is done for Deepbit. Also, the 6970 and 6990 have been sold.

[-ck]

I already sold all my 6970s in Australia. Mining with nothing but 7970s now.

[organofcorti]

I already sold all my 6970s in Australia. Mining with nothing but 7970s now.

I was wondering why the market was saturated.

/offtopic


I was just reminded that bitlc is still prop for the next little while. I think they'll be going PPLNS, but they're hoppable until then. I think they're delaying stats, so you'll need to use long poll data as per Deepbit.

[deepceleron]

I already sold all my 6970s in Australia. Mining with nothing but 7970s now.

I was wondering why the market was saturated.

/offtopic


I was just reminded that bitlc is still prop for the next little while. I think they'll be going PPLNS, but they're hoppable until then. I think they're delaying stats, so you'll need to use long poll data as per Deepbit.

Still no changes there after 10 months, it's less than 100ghash/s of idiot full-time miners and 300ghash/s of hoppers. https://www.bitlc.net/statistics/graphs
It should be 0% full-time miners with the pool dying after solving it's final block, but it seems the wealth of miner ignorance still abounds.

[organofcorti]

It should be 0% full-time miners with the pool dying after solving it's final block, but it seems the wealth of miner ignorance still abounds.

I do hope payout method changed or fulltimers wake up. I have to disagree with your analysis though - with 0% fulltimers that last block would never get solved. 

[deepceleron]

It should be 0% full-time miners with the pool dying after solving it's final block, but it seems the wealth of miner ignorance still abounds.

I do hope payout method changed or fulltimers wake up. I have to disagree with your analysis though - with 0% fulltimers that last block would never get solved. 

That's what I mean when I describe the death of a proportional pool, with all the fool-time miners leaving, the pool passes 43% one last time, all the hoppers leave, and the pool never finds another block. This should have happened a long time ago.